Just as Kevin gets to the glass doors, they slide shut, breathing a puff of cool air into his sweating face. Even though he craves the arctic AC, even though he sees Joy Luck gliding up the escalator within, even though she’s doing the thing with her hair again that pierces his heart like a blade, he hesitates. She’s nearly at the top of the escalator, her head rising between the twin ramparts of a massive floor display of red wine. But Kevin stands just out of range of the photocell, warded off like a vampire by a sign on the door that commands
Love
Where You Shop
Or what? thinks Kevin. His stomach clenches. The peevish professional in him wants to put a period at the end of that sentence, but his inner suburbanite — the guy who goes to Gaia Market in Ann Arbor only when his girlfriend drags him there, the defensively proud patron of real grocery stores like Kroger and the late, great Farmer Jack’s — that guy immediately resents the poster’s imperative voice, its implicit superiority, its barely disguised snob appeal. You’re not just shopping for groceries at Gaia, you’re making a political statement, a moral choice — no artificial colors, flavors, or sweeteners, say the signs, no exploited farmworkers — and you’re also proving that you’re not one of the lumpen, morbidly obese proles in synthetic fibers waddling under unflattering lights up the aisle of Meijer’s, filling your vast cart with family-sized packages of chicken, five-pound bags of frozen french fries, big plastic tubs of chunky peanut butter. Does your lumbering prole, stuffed into jeans and a gaudy sports jacket like a sausage in its casing, love where he shops? Because if you don’t love where you shop, then where you’re shopping isn’t good enough. In fact, if loving where you shop doesn’t matter to you, then maybe you shouldn’t shop here. That’s right, the sign’s telling Kevin, I’m talking to you, Mr. Royal Oak, Mr. Bachelor of General Studies, Mr. Non-Tenured Staffer, Mr. Maybe You’d Be Happier at Sam’s Club. It’s the same thing Kevin hears in his head every time he parks his five-year-old Accord among the Volvos and Subarus at the Gaia in Ann Arbor out on Washtenaw, where there used to be cheap motels and discount carpet emporia and the Ponderosa Steak House where his mother always took him to dinner when she came to visit him in college. It’s the voice that’s telling him that he’s an underachiever in every way he can imagine, professionally, personally, financially.
But it’s not just the snobbery that gets to him. He grew up with snobbery, he spent his teens hanging out at Somerset Mall and making time with rich, smart-mouthed Jewish girls from Franklin or Huntington Woods, or even richer Kingswood School girls, spooky-intense WASP princesses from Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe, and by age sixteen he was used to being cut dead for his store-brand jeans or his haircut or his shitty Pinto. Hell, he wasn’t just used to it — he wore their condescension like a badge, he thought it was funny. (And it’s even funnier in retrospect, because in the years since, he has gone to work in academia, which means that on a daily basis he’s condescended to by experts.) It’s just that once upon a time, Ann Arbor was different, Ann Arbor was above all that suburban class-warfare bullshit. Okay, maybe it never was, not really, maybe it’s the soft-focus blur of mid-life nostalgia, maybe he’s been soaking for too long in Ann Arbor’s marinade of pretension and infinite self-regard — but he remembers his college days and a few years after as a time of great leveling, when even the mouthy daughters of Southfield furriers and the guilty-rich daughters of GM executives found the lanky son of a middle manager from Royal Oak exotic; when everybody he knew voted for the Rainbow People’s Party candidate for mayor, a sexy manager from Borders; when the owner of Big Star Records used to hold parties in the basement of his house in Burns Park and supply the weed himself; when the term “politically correct” was a joke that lefties told on themselves. Sure we were smug, thinks Kevin, sure we were superior, but I was part of something then, I belonged in Ann Arbor in a way that I never belonged at Somerset Mall or in Bloomfield Hills or even Royal Oak for that matter. I was one of them.
Of course, even if you were one of them, Ann Arbor’s righteousness could be a pain in the ass. Kevin can still hear the humorless whine of some grim little rich girl whose painter’s pants he tried to get into one summer evening, the painter’s pants that she wore just tight enough to make her unattainable ass perfectly round. They were toking up on the battered couch on the porch of her communal house on Greenwood Street, and she told him that the personal is political, that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, that she’s sure he’s a nice guy and all, but has he read Shulamith Firestone on love? (He had, and it depressed him for a month, not because he believed a word of it, but because every girl he had a crush on did.) And besides, she continued, sadistically pressing herself closer to him on the ancient sofa, she was thinking maybe it was time for her take a woman for a lover.
“I’m just not that into penetration anymore,” she said, calibrating to the fucking millimeter exactly what effect that kind of talk has on a guy. But Kevin knew the drill, he knew the speech by heart by now, so he said, “I hear you. That’s cool.” And they each took another hit off the joint, thigh to thigh on the swaybacked couch during the long midwestern twilight, the girl weighing her lust against her ideological purity, and Kevin wondering — as the weed tugged at his dick with little silk strings — what would happen if he put his hand on her breast.
Without realizing it, he’s already floated through the doors of the Gaia Market in Austin as if on a little cannabis cloud, as if he’s tapped into some long dormant reserve of THC stored deep in his body fat. Frosty air smelling of produce curls around him like a big mitt, reeling him in, chilling the sweat all over his body, and he glides past three more iterations of the sign: LOVE WHERE YOU SHOP, LOVE WHERE YOU SHOP, LOVE WHERE YOU SHOP. The repetition is intended to plant the slogan deep in his medulla oblongata, making it instinctive like fear or hunger, while at the same time rendering it functionally meaningless to his conscious mind, like saying “cat” over and over again. That’s exactly what bothers him the most, in fact, and he wants to dig his heels in, but his feet aren’t even touching the ground, he’s floating up the escalator now under the big posterboard banners that proclaim Gaia’s brand identity with Newspeak directness: ORGANIC, PURE FOOD, QUALITY, WELLNESS. At the top Joy Luck is talking to one of Gaia’s whole-food jihadists, an überfoodie, a lean boy with biceps and a wispy beard, wearing a green Gaia T-shirt and matching ball cap. Maybe it’s Ian, about to have his ass handed to him, and Kevin thinks, you tell him, sister, because when you’re done, I want a piece of him, too. Kevin wants to dig his fingers into that smug green T-shirt and rock that grinning, gentle, clueless boy back on his heels and tell him what the problem is with Gaia: that they’ve taken everything that was both special and obnoxious about the Ann Arbor Kevin used to love — the food, the politics, and the attitude — and they’ve packaged it, art-directed it, and marketed it to Kevin at three times the price he used to pay at the Packard Food Co-op. It’s just like Wal-Mart crushing small-town pharmacies and hardware stores, only it’s worse, because the stores that Gaia is exterminating weren’t like the mom-and-pop grocery stores that never knew what hit them, no, Gaia’s victims actually had a political analysis of consumer culture, and now here’s this national, centralized, corporate simulacrum of everything co-opers held dear and it’s successfully wooing away the co-op’s clientele on the same principle as Office Max or Home Depot. And because the brainy Chomsky readers who run the co-ops have a political analysis, they know exactly what’s happening to them: it’s the last reenactment of the Battle of Bertrand Russell — first time as farce, second time as tragedy — as the gentle vegans and pacifists who thought they could wear down corporate hegemony like water on a rock find instead that corporate hegemony has opened wide and is eating them alive, and they get to watch their own death, kicking and screaming like Robert Shaw in Jaws.